MOBILITY FROM WHERE, TO WHERE?
OPINION | Brandi Cagle

A raise is good news. A new job is good news. No longer needing assistance is good news. 

These are the milestones we recognize as progress. Earn more. Find better work. Need less help. Move forward. 

But there is an uncomfortable space between crisis and security where those milestones become harder to interpret. 

What if the raise moves a family beyond an income threshold for assistance, but still doesn’t cover the cost of child care? What if the new job pays more, but rent, groceries and transportation still consume nearly everything coming in? What if a household is doing better by nearly every measure we know how to track and still ends each month with so little room that needed dental work becomes a financial decision? 

Are they economically secure? 

Or have they simply become harder for our systems to see? 

There is a name for many of the households living in this space: ALICE, or Asset Limited, Income Constrained, Employed. 

ALICE households earn above the Federal Poverty Level but less than what it actually costs to afford basic necessities where they live. In Mecklenburg County, 11% of households were living below the Federal Poverty Level in 2024. But 37% were below the ALICE Threshold. Of the county’s 486,412 households, 129,135 were ALICE: above poverty, but still unable to afford the basics. —United For ALICE

Those numbers describe two very different versions of economic hardship in the same community. 

In 2024, the Federal Poverty Level for a single adult was $15,060. The federal measure is adjusted annually for inflation, but its underlying methodology dates to the 1960s. It is not recalculated each year by asking what a household actually pays today for housing, child care, health care, transportation or other basic necessities. Nor does it account for geographic differences in the cost of living. —U.S. Census Bureau: How the Census Bureau Measures Poverty

United For ALICE asks a different question: What does it actually cost to afford the basics where you live? 

In Mecklenburg County, that answer for a single adult was $43,704. Mecklenburg had the highest single-adult Household Survival Budget of any county in North Carolina. —WFAE

And “survival” means exactly what it sounds like. The Household Survival Budget accounts for housing, food, transportation, health care, technology, taxes and other basic necessities. It does not include building an emergency fund, saving for retirement or college, or accumulating wealth. 

It answers a very basic question: 

Can this household meet today’s expenses? 

United For ALICE also calculates a Household Stability Budget. For that same single adult in Mecklenburg County, stability required an estimated $69,564 annually. For a family of four with two young children in child care, the difference stretches from $105,540 for survival to $165,396 for stability. —WFAE

The distinction matters. Survival asks: Can this household meet today’s basic expenses? Stability begins accounting for some ability to withstand tomorrow. 

And mobility should presumably mean something beyond either. 

Charlotte has spent more than a decade reckoning with economic mobility. We have studied it, funded it, organized around it and made it part of our civic vocabulary. 

But mobility inherently implies movement. 

Mobility from where, to where? 

If our starting point is poverty and our finish line is simply not poverty, we’ve created a remarkably low bar for what we call economic progress. A household can move statistically out of poverty without ever moving into economic security. A person earning $30,000 can get a better job paying $40,000. We should celebrate that progress. 

But there is another question worth asking: Did the cost of their life become affordable? 

In Mecklenburg County, the answer may still be no. 

ALICE isn’t standing outside Charlotte’s economy waiting to get in. ALICE is already inside it, helping it run. 

The people preparing our food, caring for patients, cleaning buildings, transporting goods and supporting offices are part of the workforce our economy depends on. Yet federal occupational data for the Charlotte region shows average wages in several of those fields at or below what a single adult would need to meet Mecklenburg’s Survival Budget. —U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics

This is not a population sitting at the margins of our economy. It is part of the labor that sustains it. 

Which raises a harder question for those of us working in and around philanthropy and nonprofit service: 

What happens when our systems use poverty eligibility as a proxy for need? 

There are understandable reasons for income thresholds. Public funding often requires them. Resources are finite. Organizations have to determine where those resources go. 

But thresholds have consequences. 

In 2026, the Federal Poverty Guideline for one person rose to $15,960. Two hundred percent of that is $31,920. Mecklenburg’s most recent Survival Budget for one adult is $43,704. —N.C. Department of Health and Human Services

Consider someone earning $32,000. 

For a program that sets its eligibility ceiling at 200% of the Federal Poverty Guideline, that person would earn just enough to no longer qualify. Yet according to the ALICE measure, they remain nearly $12,000 short of what it takes to cover basic necessities in Mecklenburg County. 

Their rent didn’t decrease when their income crossed the eligibility line. Their groceries didn’t become cheaper. The dental work they needed didn’t become more affordable. 

They simply crossed a threshold. 

Where exactly are they supposed to go? 

A system can faithfully follow its rules and still leave ALICE outside the door. 

This is not an indictment of the organizations working within those systems. It is an invitation to look more closely at what our measures may be missing. 

Those of us working in philanthropy and nonprofit service care deeply about impact. We measure people served, jobs obtained, income increased, benefits accessed and households reaching important financial milestones. 

Those measures matter. But ALICE presents an uncomfortable follow-up: 

What if our outcome says “success” before the household experiences stability? 

Employment isn’t necessarily stability. Higher income isn’t necessarily stability. Leaving public assistance isn’t necessarily stability. 

Each can represent meaningful progress. But if someone’s basic household expenses still exceed their income, we should be cautious about declaring the work finished. 

We risk mistaking the absence of poverty for the presence of stability. 

Charlotte has made economic mobility part of its civic identity. ALICE does not ask us to abandon that work or discount the progress we’ve made. It gives us an opportunity to sharpen what we mean by it. 

If nearly four in ten Mecklenburg households cannot afford the basics while only about one in ten are officially poor, then poverty alone cannot tell us who is economically vulnerable. And crossing the poverty line cannot, by itself, tell us who has achieved economic security. 

If stability is what we actually want for families, perhaps stability is what we should begin measuring, funding and designing for. 

A raise is still good news. A new job is still good news. No longer needing assistance is still good news. 

Getting beyond poverty is a milestone worth celebrating. 

It just shouldn’t be mistaken for the finish line.